The Two Americas

I don’t want to poach on Stephen Cox’s territory in his monthly Word Watch column, but I have an observation to make about rhetoric. The observation is this: The function of rhetoric isn’t just to appeal to an audience; it is also to identify an audience. Lately this has been happening a lot, and with instructive results.

Three examples:

1. President Obama’s response to the question about whether he knew about the scandalous behavior of the IRS. He said that he didn’t know about the report on the scandalous behavior. This was a shockingly obvious dodge. It starkly revealed the president’s stupidity. But it was a carefully prepared response. It was a calculated dodge. It was calculated to appeal to partisan insiders, who knew (wink, nod) that the rhetoric was grossly misleading but hoped it would save some part of the president’s bacon. So it identified that audience. And it identified another audience — the general American population, which was expected to receive Obama’s claims with passive credulity, thus proving itself even stupider than the president himself.

2. Hillary Clinton’s screaming fit before a congressional committee, some months ago, about the causes of the Benghazi attack. Arms waving, she shrieked, “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?”Never a good actress, Clinton wasn’t up to the role of Lady Macbeth, despite the fact that she is Lady Macbeth, and she had obviously been practicing her outburst. Now, who can take seriously a secretary of state whose head blows off at the suggestion that it might be of some interest to discover why people attacked an American diplomatic outpost and murdered an American ambassador — and on her watch, too? The answer is . . . the mainstream media! They took it seriously. Their commentators almost unanimously lauded her powerful and unanswerable performance. Of course, her act was precisely the opposite of strong and convincing; looking back on it, Washington insiders wince about the expectation that it would delude the rubes. But here are the two audiences that her rhetoric identified — the insiders and the rubes. The rubes, it turns out, were not fooled, but the insiders were.

3. The IRS folk and their government investigator, testifying before Congress late in May. The investigator seemed stupefied that his nothing-but-the-facts rhetoric didn’t cover all the bases: when asked why his interrogators had included IRS supervisors in their interviews with IRS employees, he was shocked, amazed. He hadn’t expected such a question — coming, as it did, from outside the charmed circle of Washington bureaucrats. The IRS directors were a hundred times worse. Asked the most obvious questions — obvious, that is, to anyone not in that circle — they used the rhetoric of word and gesture to convey the impression that they were the victims of lèse majesté. They didn’t know what happened. They didn’t know whom they had asked about what happened. They didn’t know who, if anyone, was “disciplined” because of what happened. Of one thing they were certain: they shouldn’t have been asked about any of it. To communicate this idea, they sighed; they sneered; they made faces; they made unfunny jokes about Easter egg hunts; they tried every form of rhetoric available to them to communicate the idea that the questions — again, the perfectly obvious questions — were grossly inappropriate and outré. They assumed that the only audience that mattered was people like themselves, people who are entitled to power and justifiably resent all attempts to wrest it from them. The rest of us couldn’t possibly be significant.

Well. What does this mean? It means one of two things:

1. These people are right: There are two Americas, two audiences for American political discourse. One consists of people like themselves — wise leaders and their intelligent, well-educated, politically correct students and disciples, the modern-liberal establishment and power structure. This is the only audience that counts, either culturally or politically. The other America consists of people who, being perpetual fools and dupes, are out of power and always will be.

2. These people are right: There are two Americas, two audiences for American political discourse. One consists of people like themselves — simpletons who are prepared to swallow almost anything, from the idea that prosperity results from giving the government all your money to the idea that Barack Obama is an honest man. The other America consists of people who know better, and are sometimes willing to do something about it.

I think I know which view is right. But I thank Obama, Clinton, and the minions of the IRS for revealing the issues so clearly, though so unconsciously, in their inimitable displays of rhetoric.

A Presidency Imploding

Since the beginning of the modern presidency under Franklin Roosevelt, every chief executive elected to a second term has suffered disaster during that term. FDR provoked a major political crisis when he tried to pack the Supreme Court in 1937, after which he guided the economy into a severe recession, undoing some of the economic gains of his first four years in office. Truman had Korea. Eisenhower faced Sputnik and the recession of 1958–59 (the worst in 20 years), followed by the U-2 incident and the collapse of a planned summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Lyndon Johnson suffered through Vietnam and widespread race riots. Nixon became embroiled in Watergate, was impeached and resigned. Reagan nearly lost office in the Iran-Contra scandal. Clinton’s “bimbo eruptions” eventually led to his impeachment, though he was acquitted by the Senate. George W. Bush had Iraq, Katrina, and the financial meltdown of 2008. Now it’s Barack Obama’s turn.

Obama roundly defeated Mitt Romney to win reelection in 2012. Yet today, not even six months into his second term, he is politically wounded, perhaps mortally so. After deciding to push gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre, he failed to secure congressional passage of even his minimum program for universal background checks. Immigration reform, expected to be the signature domestic achievement of his second term, is hanging fire in the Senate, and faces questionable prospects in the House. The implementation of Obamacare is fraught with problems (on this see David Brooks’ column “Health Chaos Ahead,” in the April 25 New York Times). Foreign policy, normally a presidential strength when the nation is not actually at war, seems increasingly in disarray. Relations with Russia are fraying. No progress has been made on curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The possibility of US intervention in Syria’s complex civil war seems to be increasing, with planning underway for an air campaign in support of the Syrian rebels, and a forward headquarters of the US Central Command already on the ground in Jordan. Add to these problems the troika of scandals currently roiling Washington (Benghazi, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, and the Justice Department’s secret spying on the Associated Press), and a picture of an administration nearing collapse begins to form.

Let’s examine briefly the three scandals just mentioned. The 9/11/12 attack on the U.S. consulate at Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the deaths of four Americans, came about as a result of mistakes made by the Obama administration and the Republicans in Congress (who in 2011 turned down an administration request to provide more funds for embassy security). The administration made the scandal all its own by putting out misleading talking points that claimed the attack was not terror-related. It clearly did so for political purposes, seeking to preserve Obama’s reputation as a successful fighter of terrorism during the election campaign. The web of lies about Benghazi woven by the administration since last September will not bring it down, but the political damage is likely to be significant and lasting.

Today, not even six months into his second term, President Obama is politically wounded, perhaps mortally so.

The IRS targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status probably won’t destroy the Obama presidency either, but it could. We don’t yet know just how high up the rot goes. If it can be shown that people in the White House encouraged the IRS campaign (or simply knew about it and did nothing), then the scandal rises to Nixonian levels. The betting here is that Obama and his people aren’t that stupid, but we’ll see. Don’t hold your breath for impeachment, but do expect a long drawn-out series of investigations that will bog down the administration for much of 2013.

The AP spying scandal is merely a continuation of the quasi-authoritarianism instituted by federal authorities after the original 9/11. One of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon was based in part on his use of wiretapping without a court order. Today the Department of Justice conducts warrantless wiretaps as a matter of course, thanks to the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2012, which Obama signed into law after his reelection. This particular scandal has legs because journalists were the target. But it’s really no more than business as usual in our Orwellian Republic. The administration may take some hits, but the damage will not be mortal.

Nothing that has happened so far in Obama’s second term rises to the level of Watergate. Yet, taken together, the mistakes and lies of the past eight months have this administration reeling. It truly is in danger of imploding — which for many on the Right would be good news. A crippled presidency, however, tends to breed uncertainty and malaise, with bad consequences for the economy. And there is the further danger that a crippled president might seek to redeem himself in foreign lands — Syria, for example, or Iran.

The second term woes of Obama’s predecessors were largely the result of hubris (or, in Ronald Reagan’s case, incipient senility). Obama on the other hand suffers principally from aloofness. He is under the impression that elections are all that matter. But we do not live in a plebiscitary democracy. Successful governing involves schmoozing with people you may secretly detest. It involves coming down from your pedestal and actually engaging other human beings who also have supporters and power. Obama has never wanted to do this. He prefers to stand alone, believing that the adoration of his supporters guarantees success. As a result he has few real resources to draw upon in times of trouble. And he is in trouble now. No single problem (the IRS scandal possibly excepted) can bring him down, but he faces the prospect of a slow political death from a thousand cuts. While he undoubtedly will seek to place blame for his troubles on those who have always opposed him, his foremost enemy dwells in the mirror.

About this AuthorJon Harrison, a former Liberty contributing editor (2008–2014), is a freelance writer and editor.

What Did You Know, and Why Didn’t You Know It?

To me, the funniest part of the administration’s current travail is its entrapment between the devil of activism and the deep blue sea of ignorance.

President Obama has pursued an aggressively state-socialist policy. The belief of his church militant is that government knows best about healthcare, that government knows best about the economy, that government knows best about the environment, race relations, the nature of Islam, the legitimate leadership of Libya, the price of microchips in China. Well, a socialist government has to know these matters, because it has to plan and rule everything. But to any evidence of failure, the president’s response is, “I’m completely ignorant.”

The Benghazi affair? None of us was clear on the facts (but we made announcements, anyway). We’ll find out, after the investigation. The IRS’s persecution of Obama’s critics? I just know what I read in the papers; I’ve ordered an investigation. The secret raid on the Associated Press? I just know what I read in the papers; I can’t comment on matters under investigation.

So either the all-knowing leadership doesn’t know enough to conduct even its own political business, or it knows what it’s doing, and it’s lying about it, to preserve its own power. Take your pick. Either way, it doesn’t look good for state socialism.

Told that President McKinley was going to visit his town, Mr. Dooley, the Irish bartender who was given immortal life by Finley Peter Dunne, made this remark: “I may niver see him. I may go to me grave without gettin’ an’ eye on th’ wan man besides mesilf that don’t know what th’ furrin’ policy iv th’ United States is goin’ to be.”

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution. Newly published is Culture and Liberty, a selection of works by Isabel Paterson.

President Obama, Meet Alfred E. Neuman

Isn’t it interesting that Barack Obama, whose presidency is intellectually and demographically a product of the antiwar, anti-imperialist, distrust-government movement of the 1960s and 1970s, has emerged as an automatic exponent of hidebound, don’t give an inch, interventionist, obscurantist, and warmaking government?

Obama couldn’t sit back and watch revolutions happen in Arab countries. He just had to intervene. Now he has to threaten and meddle in Syria, of all places. We will be fortunate if his militarism remains as feckless as it is right now.

As for domestic affairs . . . he couldn’t turn his crusading spirit against the entrenched forces of the Washington bureaucracy, as he appeared to have promised in 2008. Oh no. So far, he’s never seen a bureaucracy he didn’t want to defend. Not one of his significant officials has been invited to resign for his or her notorious failures. They’re all still there, telling transparent lies to Congress and the nation.

The latest example is Obama’s response to the gross failure of the FBI, which did nothing either to prevent the Boston bombers from doing their thing or to identify them afterward, despite the fact that the Bureau had, on its right hand, a passport picture of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and, on its left hand, videos of the same Tamerlan Tsarnaev planting bombs. In the face of this evidence, the president proclaimed that the FBI did a great job.

According to the Washington Post:

In his first news conference since the Boston attack, Obama said law enforcement agencies had performed in “exemplary fashion” in the hunt for the bombers and in investigating one of the suspects before the bombings. He accused critics of chasing headlines.

“Based on what I’ve seen so far, the FBI performed its duties,” Obama said. “Department of Homeland Security did what it was supposed to be doing. But this is hard stuff.”

Hard stuff? How hard is it to compare pictures? And how hard is it to devise ways of keeping creeps like the Tsarnaevs out of the country? Or their creepy friends, now arrested for covering up the Tsarnaevs’ crimes? But imagine that you’re a government bureaucrat. Then your default position will be: student visas — why check? And yes, suppose that the Tsarnaevs return to the country that is supposedly persecuting them, thereby giving them a reason to live on welfare in the United States — well, why hold that against them? They’re charged with crimes? So what? Who, me? Worry?

Ridiculous? Yes. And why should Obama defend it?

The sad explanation is that he is a part of the old “counterculture” at its silliest, and it turns out to be intellectually and emotionally indistinguishable from the political “culture” it warred against. War is wrong — except when good people (like us) are waging it. Imperialism is wrong — except when good people (like us) are pushing the foreigners around. Entrenched bureaucracies are wrong — except when they are entrenched bureaucracies run by good people (us again!).

So that’s what it all came down to. Authority is wrong whenever I’m not the authority. But whenever I am, it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Critics are just chasing headlines.

The ’60s died — not with a bang but a blowhard.

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution. Newly published is Culture and Liberty, a selection of works by Isabel Paterson.

The Carnival at Dallas

The spectacle of five presidents — Carter, Bush, Clinton, the other Bush, Obama — meeting to compliment one another at the opening of the second Bush’s presidential library reminded me irresistibly of chapter 26 of Candide, the Symposium of Monarchs. In that episode, Voltaire satirizes authority by arranging for six kings to discover that they are staying at the same inn at Venice. Their conversation reveals their inanity and (as Voltaire would have it) the inanity of human life. Whatever you think of Voltaire’s ideas, it’s a very funny chapter.

So here we have our own Symposium of Monarchs, a meeting of men who have wielded infinitely more power than any king of the Old Regime. Who are these people?

None of them had any qualification whatever for the office once assumed by Washington. In fact, it’s hard to think of anyone, among all the varied occupants of the presidential chair, who was less qualified than they were. Maybe John Tyler. In fact, none of them was impelled to the position by anything other than ambition for office.

Two of them — the Bushes — are agreeable human beings, and the elder Bush was a war hero, a real war hero. Unfortunately, neither father nor son had any intellectual qualifications. The younger Bush reads history but is incapable of profiting from his studies. The elder Bush showed himself incapable of understanding even his own emphatic promise not to raise taxes. He folded as soon as the opposing party offered to sell him a bridge in Brooklyn. He bought the bridge, and lost the presidency. The younger Bush was unable to understand even the rudimentary principles of limited government. But you could say that about all of them. None of them showed even the faintest understanding of his oath of office.

Carter is a mean, twisted, little man, a disgusting specimen of self-righteousness and vindictiveness. My goal in life is to stay as far away as possible from things like that.

Intellectual qualifications . . . unlike virtually all former presidents, none of the five, with the possible exception of Carter, is able to speak in his own voice for even one minute without committing a gross grammatical error. None of them, including the current president, himself reputedly the author of a book, is capable of an accurate allusion to anybody else’s book. Most of them don’t even try. Listen to Obama’s speeches; notice what or whom he mentions. It’s always “a teacher in Montana” or “a little girl in New Jersey.” Acton? Madison? Webster? Whitman? Churchill? Cather? Twain? And here they are at the dedication of a library.

Experience? Carter and Clinton were goofball governors of Southern states. The Bushes were rich people. Obama was a black student who was elected, for unknown but surmisable reasons, editor of a college law review, then a hack politician employed by the Chicago political machine.

Personal qualifications? Great personalities? Commanding leadership? Eccentric and interesting insights? Inspiring examples of morality? All these people, except the elder Bush, who was a professional promiser and non-fulfiller, can properly be called professional liars. Some lied with an exuberance appropriate to men who really enjoy the sport. On Carter, see Robert Novak’s autobiography; you’ll be entertained. On Clinton, consult your memories. On Obama, just listen to the man. On the younger Bush . . . I’m not referring to his theories about Iraq, on which he appears to have been sincerely deluded. On such issues as censorship (freedom of speech is sacred, but take all this sex off the internet), big government (I’m against it, but raise high the roofbeams, carpenters!), and immigration (open the gates, but pretend to be building walls), he lied with abandon.

Which one of these people would you like to serve with on a condo board? A department committee? A working group of any kind? Chorus of “None!” Carter would automatically attack as “racist” anyone who disagreed with him. Obama, a good casting choice for Creon in Antigone, would insist on lecturing everyone like a high school principal. The Bushes would never finish a sentence. Clinton would be looking for a deal that would enrich himself and promote the career of his banshee wife. And which one of them would you like to have a beer with? Which one — to return to the Candide analogy — would you like to encounter at the Carnival of Venice?

My answer used to be, “All of them but Carter.” Carter is a mean, twisted, little man, a disgusting specimen of self-righteousness and vindictiveness. My goal in life is to stay as far away as possible from things like that. But I used to say that if I lived next door to Obama or one of the other recent presidents, I would enjoy talking to him. I used to say that I imagined he would be a good neighbor. A couple of years ago, I got in trouble at a libertarian conference by saying these things.

If these men had remained private citizens, if they had never, accidentally, been elevated to the presidency, would I have wanted to schmooze with them?

But now I’m not so sure. I guess it’s still true about the good neighbor part. None of the non-Carter presidents fits the profile of a bad neighbor, if only because none of them cares very much about who waters the lawn. (Some underling will do it.) On Centre Street in San Diego, this noble disengagement would be a relief. It’s a long way, however, from qualifying someone for political power. I don’t think that Obama, Clinton, or the Bushes would start baying at the moon, or building houses for po’ folk in my back yard. But do I want to have a beer with one of these presidents? Maybe not.

True, I’d like to hear them discuss their political experiences. I wouldn’t object; I’d just listen. I’d buy a whole saloonful of beers, just to be able to do that . . . except . . . except for this vagrant thought: if these men had remained private citizens, if they had never, accidentally, been elevated to the presidency, would I have wanted to schmooze with them? Would I have thought they merited a change in my schedule?

The obvious answer is: Hell no! Are you kidding?

If Obama were a high school principal, or even a congressman, who would want to talk with him? There is nothing, nothing whatever, that is interesting about the man, except the weird political processes that elected him — on which he himself is unlikely to be an authority. Ditto Clinton — of no interest unless you’re one of those old-timey guys who liked to hang with the whores and the cops and collect their observations. The Bushes? Sorry. Life is short. As Gertrude Stein opined, “There’s no there, there.”

When, in Voltaire’s novel, Candide meets his useless monarchs, and so many of them at once, he is at first convinced that he is “witnessing a masquerade.” Then he says, “Gentlemen, this is an odd joke. Why are you all kings?”

He never gets an answer.

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution. Newly published is Culture and Liberty, a selection of works by Isabel Paterson.

The Budget Charade

On April 10 President Obama submitted his fiscal 2014 budget to Congress. Sixty-five days late and 2,400 pages long, it calls for $3.77 trillion in spending, with a projected deficit of $744 billion. It turns off the automatic budget cuts imposed by sequestration, and thus increases federal spending by some $160 billion over fiscal 2013. Its projections assume that over $5 trillion will be added to the national debt during the next ten years.

One never quite gets used to these figures; they boggle the mind. Only 50 years ago the federal government’s annual budget was under $100 billion (about $700 billion in today’s money), and deficits were small. Then the irresponsible policies of Lyndon Johnson (guns and butter: massive domestic spending increases and a major war fought without raising taxes) and Richard Nixon (fiat money replacing gold) began America’s descent into virtual bankruptcy. Johnson opened the floodgates of deficit spending. Nixon launched the lamentable decline of the once almighty dollar.

Deficit spending and fiat money have a symbiotic relationship; they march together on the path to fiscal doom. The policies of every succeeding president have only made these problems worse. Needless to say, Congress has been equally irresponsible, whether under Democrat or Republican leadership. It is the votes of Congress, after all, that transform bad economics into law.

Only 50 years ago the federal government’s annual budget was under $100 billion (about $700 billion in today’s money), and deficits were small.

The president’s budget proposals were preceded by those of the Senate and the House. In late March the Democrat-controlled Senate passed a budget that increases taxes by almost $1 trillion over ten years, while still adding over $5 trillion to the national debt. “The only good news is that the fiscal path the Democrats laid out in their budget resolution won’t become law,” said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. That’s true, but on the other hand I can’t see the Congress passing a budget that will be much of an improvement over the Democrats’ plan. Certainly the Republican-led House provided nothing but faux leadership on the issue.

The Republicans in the House unveiled their budget a few days before the Senate acted. House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan produced a plan based on political impossibilities. It repeals Obamacare. It turns Medicare into a voucher program. Neither of these ideas has the slightest chance of becoming law anytime soon, and Ryan knows it. Ryan’s budget reduces the top tax rate from 35 to 25%, eliminates the alternative minimum tax, and repeals the tax increases contained in Obamacare, yet assumes that revenues will remain level. It says nothing about which loopholes it will close and which deductions it will eliminate to make the revenue projection real. In other words, it is a through-and-through political document, and not a serious plan designed to bring spending and deficits under control. Even if its fantastical proposals were enacted, it would still require ten years to bring the budget into balance.

Given the Great Recession, it is practically impossible to balance the budget in ten years’ time — the risk of sending the economy into a tailspin of 1930s proportions is just too great. But no officeholder has put forward a serious proposal to balance the budget on any timetable. The one attempt to do so, flawed though it may be, is the plan offered in 2010 by the Simpson-Bowles commission. Unfortunately, the politicians, led by the president (Obama) who created the commission, have done nothing to implement its recommendations. Simpson-Bowles allows 40 years to get to a balanced budget. Yet no politician will touch it, beyond giving it mild and passing praise. The “sacrifices” it entails are apparently too great for politicians to contemplate.

In his budget Obama proposed a change in the way in which cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients are figured. This small, helpful step saves a few billion a year, but does not address the root problem, which is demographic. And while Obama claims he will cut $400 billion from Medicare over ten years, the savings are supposed to be found by cutting payments to providers, a sure recipe for reducing the number of doctors who will take Medicare patients. In any case, if this is all the Democrats are prepared to do on entitlement reform (and the left wing of the party is up in arms about even these small changes), then surely insolvency (for Medicare at least) is inevitable.

We have a spending problem. It’s a problem that cannot be resolved by simply raising taxes. Both the welfare and the warfare state require drastic reform, as does the tax code. And generational oppression — the old sucking up resources at the expense of the young — must be curbed. Yet where is the political will or wisdom to accomplish these necessary things? It is utterly lacking. What then does the future hold?

I predict that the idea of inflating our way out of debt will at some point take hold in political, academic, and media circles. Such a course would deal a death blow to the dollar, and leave wage earners, savers, and other responsible people even worse off than they are now. But it might get the politicians off the hook, at least temporarily. The pols will blame anyone and everyone but themselves for the inflation they have created, and retire on indexed pensions while the rest of us eat grass.

We seem set on this course already. In the 1980s Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker killed the inflationary dragon that had plagued the world economy for a decade and more. It has until now stayed dead; indeed, deflation is the worry of the moment. But in the wake of the Great Recession, central bankers, egged on by politicians, have been printing money like crazy. With the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England all engaged in “quantitative easing,” the return of the dragon looks inevitable at some point. A world awash in fiat money must suffer inflation eventually.

Where is the political will or wisdom to accomplish these necessary things? It is utterly lacking.

Central bankers believe that they will know when to turn off the printing presses. They envision themselves acting at just the right moment to prevent the outbreak of serious inflation. This seems about as likely as an investor timing the market correctly — that is, the chance of getting it right appears very small. The question of timing aside, turning off the presses is certain to cause a crash in the bond market and a rise in interest rates, with dire consequences not just for the arbitrageurs, but for the world economy. History provides little comfort for those who believe in the capacity of central bankers to prevent economic catastrophe. Volcker may have saved the world economy back in the early ’80s, but he stands almost alone. The behavior of central bankers today reminds one of Alan Greenspan’s abysmal performance during his last decade as Fed chairman. One may even be justified in comparing the central bankers of today to John Law.

A bargain (grand or otherwise) between Democrats and Republicans over the federal budget is unlikely to do more than put off the day of reckoning. The necessary, thoroughgoing reforms are so politically unpalatable that they will almost certainly never be enacted. The budget process in Washington is a charade. And so I ask myself, can I learn to like the taste of grass?

About this AuthorJon Harrison, a former Liberty contributing editor (2008–2014), is a freelance writer and editor.

The Hypocrisy of High Office

The president’s boundless hypocrisy is always a source of wonderment to me. This is one of his most salient traits, along with narcissism, arrogance, and contempt for all who disagree with him.

His hypocrisy was apparent from the first. The moment he took office, he killed the voucher program that gave an opportunity to 2,500 poor minority children to escape the wretched school system of the District of Columbia. He did this at the very moment when he and his wife were putting their own kids in the swankiest, spendiest private school in the city.

Then there has been his endless bashing of the rich — while he and his wife were collecting millions from rich donors, many of whom got prominent roles in the administration, or taxpayer-subsidized loans and grants from it.

The latest illustrations are equally . . . rich. The first is the news that Obama, even while campaigning strenuously to limit everyone else’s gun rights, has just signed into law a bill that will give him Secret Service protection for life — that is, protection by armed guards, furnished by the government. He thus reversed a law from the 1990s that put a 10-year limit on the coverage.

Yes, even while the administration is ghoulishly exploiting dead children in its calls for an assault weapons ban, making all federal buildings “gun-free” zones, and limiting the size of bullet clips, Obama himself will be protected in perpetuity by men carrying those evil guns.

In this respect, it must be noted, Obama simply joined the ranks of other famous people who oppose guns for everybody but themselves or their bodyguards. It upsets me to do so, but I think of Rosie O’Donnell, Dianne Feinstein, Michael Bloomberg, and Michael Moore, all of whom have sought or employed armed guards or have their own conceal-carry permits, while waging war against the Second Amendment.

None of them, however, can manifest hypocrisy on such a grand scale as we have seen in the Great Obama Sequester Scare. Honestly, I cannot fathom how anybody could be silly enough to think that a 2% cut in the budget — which is slated to grow by an even greater amount than that, so that net spending by the federal government will in fact go up, but by a slightly smaller amount than planned — will cause catastrophic consequences. Yet Obama, ever the demagogue, used every scare tactic in the book to arouse opposition to the plan that he himself devised, suggesting that planes would crash, thousands (or was it millions?) of teachers would lose their jobs, billions of people would die from eating uninspected food, floods of biblical proportion would ravage the landscape, and all manner of other hysterical hoohah.

For once the Republicans called his bluff. They allowed the sequester to happen. So Obama is now cutting expenditures in ways that are clearly intended to punish both Republican politicians and all taxpayers vicious enough to support any schemes of fiscal restraint. His most daring attempt to curb expenditures (so far, at least) has been to stop White House tours — right about Spring Break time. The intent is obviously to make the vacationing little ones cry out to their parents, who will then be filled with outrage against the enemies of government spending. The savings from these omitted tours? A gargantuan $18,000 a week. For larger savings, the administration released a horde of alleged lawbreakers, formerly held for deportation proceedings. Undoubtedly, these people will report to the proper authorities, whenever requested to do so. No security problems there.

But where security really matters, the administration is careful not to cut at all. For example, Department of Homeland Security chief Janet (“Big Sister”) Napolitano announced that while the Secret Service’s budget will be cut, the president’s own security team won’t be reduced a penny. And don’t worry — there are apparently no plans to cut the White House calligraphers, who (as noted by Kimberley Strassel) collectively earn $277,000 a year. They’re worth as much as four months of White House tours — and apparently cheap at the price. Otherwise, I’m sure, they would have been laid off.

It’s too bad that the president doesn’t have more time to stay at home and watch them do their work. He has golfed more than any other president, and when he isn’t golfing (with those horrid rich people, by the way), he is usually on vacation. (I’m counting his speaking tours as vacation time, because after all, listening to his own voice is one of the president’s most valued forms of recreation.) But this stuff can get pricey. As Strassel observes, cutting the White House tours created savings equal to about two hours of Air Force One flying time.

I won’t even mention Michelle Obama’s upcoming 50th birthday bash, with Adele and Beyonce performing. That should cost about a thousand weeks of White House tours.

Faced with the necessity, the grim, unnatural, and wholly unforeseen necessity of cutting any government expenditures whatever, Obama will always do his best to make the cuts hurt the ordinary people whom he purports to champion, while maintaining his own life among the rich and special, spending freely on himself and friends.

What a guy!

About this Author

Gary Jason is an academic philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. His recent books, Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues and Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy are both available through Amazon.

The Sequester Effect

At this writing, the Republicans have refused to cave in on sequestration. Because half the cuts will come from defense, I thought the GOP would do almost anything to prevent the sequester from happening. But I was wrong. Whether they are operating on principle (i.e., sticking to their belief that spending must be brought under control) or simply doing what they think is politically advantageous, I couldn’t say. In either case, it may provide a lesson in political economy for all Americans.

Back in 1990, Bill Weld was elected governor of Massachusetts. Upon taking office, he instituted relatively minor cuts in social services. I can still remember the street protests and wailings from advocacy groups that the cuts would cause homelessness, starvation, and other enormities. Of course, after the cuts went through, nothing of the sort happened. People suddenly discovered that they could work at a job, or call upon relatives for assistance, or rely on private charity. It was an object lesson in how bloated and dishonest the welfare state had become since LBJ put in place the “Great Society.” Recipients and advocates of government largesse in Massachusetts had for a time persuaded a majority of their fellow citizens that welfarism was just, honorable, and necessary. But when Massachusetts ran into a fiscal wall, with deficits looming and taxes just too much of a burden, a Republican (Weld) squeaked into office and — poof! — the illusion that the state alone stood between the less well-off and a Dickensian fate burst like a soap bubble.

The sequester may prove this point again, and on a national scale. The Obama administration has been ratcheting up the hyperbole as the dread date of March 1 approaches. Beware the Kalends of March! Children will be thrown off Head Start. Small business loans may be delayed, or even (gasp!) unobtainable. National defense, on which we spend about as much money as the rest of the world combined, will be compromised when civilian employees of the Pentagon are required to take a day off per week without pay. And God alone knows what else may happen.

In fact, sequestration calls for the elimination of a little over $1.1 trillion in federal spending over a period of ten years. That’s about three cents out of every dollar in a budget that has doubled under Bush II and Obama. If the American economy can’t survive that, then the country may as well pack it in and become a province of China.

Probably the Republicans will cave later in March, as defense contractors join food stamp recipients and the long-term unemployed in bleating that the trough is no longer full. But maybe not. Maybe they’ll stand firm long enough for the public and the establishment media to realize that sequestration ain’t so bad after all.

Sequestration is a lousy way to trim the federal budget. But it’s better than business as usual. And it just might teach the citizenry that it can live with a little (or even a lot) less government.

About this AuthorJon Harrison, a former Liberty contributing editor (2008–2014), is a freelance writer and editor.

Mencken vs. the Mountebanks

“Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.” — Jonathan Swift

Last October, a man named Wlodzimierz Umaniec (also known as Vladimir Umaniec, which is only a bit more helpful) went to the Tate Gallery in London and wrote “Vladimir Umanets’ [sic] 12 A potential piece of yellowism" on a painting by Mark Rothko called “Black on Maroon.” “Yellowism,” an artistic movement of which Umaniec is an advocate or perhaps the founder, was summarized by another advocate in this way: “Everything is equal. Everything is art. Everything is a potential piece of yellowism.” Umaniec is now in jail.

The defaced painting is fairly typical of Rothko’s work — a set of rectangles painted in various murky colors. Its restoration is expected to cost $300,000, cheap at the price, considering the fact that last May another Rothko painting, “Orange, Red, Yellow,” sold for $87 million. As for the aesthetic value of “Black on Maroon” . . . what can I say? I am not a Philistine. Whistler’s engravings make my heart leap up. I am excited by the iconographic problems of the Portland Vase. The late works of George Inness are among my favorite things, and it doesn’t matter that other people call them weirdly abstract and incomprehensible. But yeah — to me, Rothko is nothing but a man who obsessively painted dull versions of dull geometrical forms. I can scrape up a little interest in his technique. I think I am qualified to say that he has the best technique of anyone who ever set out to paint rectangles on canvas. But that is all. I suspect that when the New York Times called “Orange, Red, Yellow” “the most powerful of all his pictures,” it was taking its adjective from the wrong world of discourse. It might just as accurately call the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel the most decorative of all Michelangelo’s paintings.

In this case, Yahoo! News (of all horrible things) was more literate than the New York Times. You may think, “That’s not saying much,” but here Yahoo! wins by a mile. Its headline about the Umaniec affair was “Man Jailed for Defacing Pricey Painting.” Pricey: that’s exactly right. Not powerful, not renowned, not legendary, but pricey. Pricey says the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Something similar happened in an article by Michael Tarm and Pete Yost, published in the Huffington Post on February 16. The subject was Jesse Jackson, Jr.’s confession that he had exploited his public office (18 years in Congress!) for personal aggrandizement. There was a paragraph about Jackson’s father:

Several messages left with Jackson's father, the voluble civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, were not returned Friday. The elder Jackson has often declined to comment about his son's health and legal woes over the past several months.

Voluble says it all.

And isn’t that the goal of all good writing? I mean, a good writer doesn’t ruminate, “I’m going to state an exaggeration or approximation or vague representation of the truth as I see it, and you can sort of try to figure out what I mean.” He or she says, “I’m going to come as close as I can to hitting the target, and you can watch what I do and enjoy the sight.” When somebody hits the bullseye, people stand up and cheer — at least people who are smart enough to be interested in the game. But it’s more than a game, when truth is the target.

Lamentably, many libertarians appear to believe that to hit the target, you have to aim at the moon, or at least bay at it.

Of course, there are hundreds of ways of missing the target completely. You can undershoot; you can also overshoot. To Colin Powell, a man without a sense of proportion or a sense of humor, someone’s reference to President Obama’s evasions of truth as “shucking and jiving” is self-evidently racist, and sufficient evidence of a dark vein of intolerance in the Republican Party (to which institution, by the way, he owes every bit of his national prominence). And Powell is far from the worst archer on the range. To ordinary conservative spokesmen, everything that this administration does is the greatest invasion of American liberty since . . . since when? Since the last time the Republicans voted to jail people for smoking weed? I’m reminded of the late Sen. Sam Ervin, the genial blowhard who ran the Senate investigation of Watergate. Ervin referred to the crisis that he (with the able assistance of President Nixon) was engineering as the greatest since the Civil War. Say that while standing in a cemetery created for the military dead of the 20th century.

I.F. Stone, another darling of the Beltway, went Ervin one farther. He is said to have been queried about what should be inscribed on a plaque that astronauts could affix to the moon. He suggested that mankind be memorialized in this way: “Their Destructive Ingenuity Knows No Limits and Their Wanton Pollution No Restraint. Let the Rest of the Universe Beware.” Some people never seem to count themselves as members of Humanity. Well, draw your own conclusions.

Lamentably, many libertarians also appear to believe that to hit the target, you have to aim at the moon, or at least bay at it. They feel that any adjective that’s applicable to Hitler should also be applied to the local zoning board. It’s true, and it’s of great interest to political theory, that many officials and disciples of our mild and beneficent government (note to Colin Powell: I’m being sarcastic) would act like Hitler, Stalin, or Mao Tse-Tung if they were given a decent chance. It’s also true that many of them act like that anyway, within the sphere currently allotted them. Every judge who sends kids to jail for doing drugs, every regulator who talks about “crucifying” business people who don’t get with the program, every mad mother determined to rid our veins of demon rum is a tyrant and should be called a tyrant. But a constant barrage of abusive terms does not communicate the truth, much less calibrate it. I’ll put this simply: if you do nothing but shriek in people’s ears, they may eventually get tired of you.

Isabel Paterson, who spared none of her vast vocabulary on the sins of conservatives, modern liberals, and the occasional libertarian, identified a chronic problem in the language of cultural rebellion: people kept trying to write like H.L. Mencken, but they couldn’t do it. Mencken was a genius, but they weren’t, and the result, in their own writing, was sheer and mere abuse. If you can say anything as clever as “It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull,” or “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard,” then you are entitled to rank yourself as a follower of Mencken, without fearing that his specter will appear in your room one night, cigar in hand, and cheerfully call you a mountebank. But if you can’t be that clever, you shouldn’t try.

The side of Mencken that people don’t notice is understatement, or just plain statement. Consider his review of An American Tragedy, a novel by his friend Theodore Dreiser. Mencken spends a few hundred words summarizing the plot of this long, long novel, which is about a man of no particular interest who kills a woman of no particular interest, gets caught, and gets executed. He observes Dreiser’s “spacious manner” in the “431 pages of small type” devoted to the man’s parentage, his early career, and the “disagreeable ebb” of his affair with the woman. Then he says:

So much for Volume I: 200,000 words. In Volume II we have the murder, the arrest, the trial and the execution: 185,000 more.

Obviously, there is something wrong here.

I can think of no more devastating understatement in the history of American literature.

Only after some special examples of Dreiser’s adventures in overstatement —

The “death house” in this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenances of human insensibility and stupidity principally for which no one primarily was really responsible.

Quite everything of all this was being published in the papers each day.

— does Mencken start piling on, but even then most of his attack consists of incremental understatement:

What is one to say of such dreadful bilge? What is one to say of a novelist who, after a quarter of a century at his trade, still writes it? What one is to say, I feel and fear, had better be engraved on the head of a pin and thrown into the ocean: there is such a thing as critical politesse. Here I can only remark that sentences of the kind I have quoted please me very little.

Now, while we are considering how to abuse without being abusive — in other words, how to have your say without boring everyone to tears — I should mention the existence of whimsy. You don’t have to denounce people all the time; you can also play with them. Gertrude Stein is, in her imaginative productions, someone who pleases me very little, but I love her for calling Ezra Pound “a village explainer — excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.” This is a million times better than her crude lack of whimsy in saying to her publisher, Bennett Cerf (who was a pretty good guy, and put up with a lot), “You’re a very nice boy but you’re rather stupid.” (He was “stupid,” you understand, because he failed to comprehend her incomprehensible creative works.) Anyone can say that kind of thing about anyone she wants to criticize; it ain’t worth nothin’.

Isabel Paterson identified a chronic problem in the language of cultural rebellion: people kept trying to write like H.L. Mencken, but they couldn’t do it.

Whimsy’s next-door neighbor is self-deprecation, which can do a lot more for your street cred than belaboring your enemies could ever do. Let’s face it, most of your enemies have never heard of you. People who heave brickbats at Obama (yes, I do too) often picture him as staggering, stunned and wounded by their trenchant, caustic words; they glory in the picture. But he doesn’t care — which is fine, because you don’t need him to care. The people you need are your readers. And if they’re going to care about what you say, you may need them to care about you. To like you. To trust you. To trust your judgment about the topics you discuss. And believe it or not, readers are more likely to trust an author who recognizes, or seems to recognize, his own limitations than an author who thinks only about those of other people. That is why President Obama’s true believers have been reduced to folks who don’t even try to follow his speeches — utterances so full of credit to himself, so intent on discrediting others. Better to say with old Walt Whitman (a cunning writer, if ever there was one, and never more cunning than he was when grounding his radical perspective in a trustworthy authorial ethos), “I am as bad as the worst, but thank God I am as good as the best.” Or to say with Mencken, “The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”

How do you get to be “as good as the best”? One way is just by showing that you’re having fun, as much fun as Whitman must have had when he made that statement. Very few people care whether An American Tragedy is good or bad; but in reviewing it, Mencken communicated to his audience the wonderful fun of making up your own mind on literary matters. I’d use the same adjective for the fun of being told, easily but persuasively, that you can make up your own mind about whether famous paintings are great, or merely pricey. The fun is suggested by the word itself, that one word: pricey. And there’s fun in everything, if you have the right word for it.

Mencken, an atheist or agnostic, loved traditional Christian hymns. So do I, so long as their words project the fun of choosing that one right word. An example: Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady’s (very loose) paraphrase of Psalm 130, “My soul with patience waits.” (Tate and Brady’s hymns were commonly sung in churches, c. 1700; this one is best with the tune “Franconia,” with which it is usually paired.) One of the stanzas goes like this:

My longing eyes look out
For thy enlivening ray,
More duly than the morning watch
To spy the dawning day.

Not a bad image: waiting for God’s guidance is like being a watchman, awaiting the dawn that will “enliven” everything. Watching, being a watchman, would be a dull enterprise, and it would make a dull image, were not “enlivening” provided to, well, enliven it. But look at “duly.” It’s not the first, or the thirtieth, adverb one would think of. Convenient substitutes are readily available: "As faithful as the morning watch," "More eager than the morning watch," "As hopeful as the morning watch." But “duly,” which would never occur to you if you were happy enough with ready and convenient terms, is the right, though unlikely, word. It brushes aside the emotional boilerplate and gets right to the fact: the watch is taken "duly" — daily, punctually, at the right and appointed time. Whatever you feel about waiting for the Lord, you keep on doing it, just as the shivering watchman does, every morning. That is how one becomes, eventually, enlivened. It’s all a matter of one or two words, but look at how interesting they make this song. And remember that it started with “patience.” Go write a poem about patience. See how far you get.

That little stanza shows a lot about writing, and reading too. Good writing doesn’t merely tell you something, or show you something, either; it interests you in figuring out how it told you and showed you so much.

Readers are more likely to trust an author who recognizes his own limitations. That is why President Obama’s true believers have been reduced to folks who don’t even try to follow his speeches.

Of course, I don’t mean “figuring out what the hell the author meant.” The need to do that is hardly an invitation to appreciate anyone’s literary skill, especially if you can’t tell whether the meaning you find is the right one or not. When politicians demand a “comprehensive solution to the immigration problem,” when unions demand “a living wage,” when parents confess that their kids “have issues,” when a criminal admits that he “may have made some wrong choices,” when “activists” chant (as they did in Washington the other day), “Forward on climate change!”, what is one to do? Subject their remarks to intensive literary investigation? As soon as you think you’ve found the secret significance of the words, the speakers interrupt your deliberations, asserting that you’ve “misinterpreted” them and should have put their words “in the proper context,” whatever that may be.

Garson Kanin, that prince of Hollywood wits, provided an easy exit from such difficulties. “When your work speaks for itself,” he said, “don't interrupt." A corollary is, “If you need to interrupt, then your work isn’t speaking very well for itself.” If your words need to be poked, probed, kicked, and threatened with fates worse than death before they wake up, shake their angry manes, and emit snarls of protest, then they aren’t proper words in proper places, and you have no style to bother with. So go away. We’ll have fun with someone else’s words. We’ll have fun writing our own.

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About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution. Newly published is Culture and Liberty, a selection of works by Isabel Paterson.

What Difference Did Benghazi Make?

Remember the Benghazi attack, the one against our consulate in Libya, where terrorists murdered our ambassador and three other Americans? Vaguely? It was the debacle that we were told was caused by a silly anti-Islamic video — and led to a series of tedious hearings revealing almost nothing about the trans-attack activities of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. Judging by media coverage, all that most people will remember of the hearings was the "What difference, at this point, does it make?” remark by Mrs. Clinton, in her January testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It was Clinton's indignant rejection of a line of inquiry into the State Department's initial insistence that the attack was a spontaneous response to the silly video. But it represented a political victory for Democrats. Theatric, petulant, at times tearful, always evasive, Mrs. Clinton rebuked her inquisitors while defending her role, and that of President Obama, in the handling of the attack. She deftly accepted responsibility, but not a whit of blame; and shed not a particle of light on anything that she or Mr. Obama might have done to save lives on the night of the attack. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had escaped Benghazi, now a fading tempest in a politicized Republican teapot.

Indeed, what difference did it make? Mr. Obama was reelected in November. Time, and a fawning media, have dissolved public interest in the Benghazi matter. And Mrs. Clinton's testimony was, in no small part, a valedictory for her State Department stint. She departs as one of the country's most popular political figures, and a likely candidate for president in 2016. During her 60 Minutes appearance with Obama, this popularity led her to put what she may have thought would be the final nail in the Benghazi coffin, saying of her critics, "They just will not live in an evidence-based world."

But, only a week later, on February 7, public memory was refreshed with the "evidence-based" testimony (before the Senate Armed Services Committee) of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey. We would learn that their participation during the eight-hour tragedy was timid and parochial, that of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton negligent and ignoble; their escape from Benghazi was desertion.

At 5:00 pm on the afternoon of September 11, 2012, Leon Panetta and General Dempsey met with President Obama for a routine 30-minute weekly session. But on this day, Panetta and Dempsey brought news of the Benghazi attack: it had begun about 90 minutes earlier, the lives of more than 30 US citizens were at stake, and the whereabouts of Ambassador Stevens was unknown. They spent a whopping 20 minutes with Obama discussing the situation at the American embassy in Cairo and the diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

After thus blaming the State Department, Dempsey added, "I'm not blaming the State Department."

It was at this brief meeting that Obama ordered Panetta and Dempsey to "do whatever we need to do to make sure they’re safe." Said Panetta, “He just left that up to us.” During the entire night, this was the only time Obama would communicate with Panetta and Dempsey. When Senator Lindsey Graham asked Panetta, "Did the president show any curiosity?", we found that Obama never called back to ask "are we helping these people?"

Sometime after the meeting, Obama placed a political call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to quell a perceived controversy over Obama's refusal to meet with Netanyahu two weeks later at the UN General Assembly. But he never called Panetta and Dempsey to make sure that Ambassador Stevens and associates in Libya — Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, Glen Doherty, and dozens of others — were OK. No situation room, no gutsy decisions; the 30-minute, 5 o'clock meeting and the one hour Netanyahu phone call are all we know of Obama's activities that evening. Panetta also testified that he did not communicate with a single person at the White House that night.

Nor did Clinton communicate with Panetta and Dempsey. Senator Ted Cruz asked them, "In between 9:42 p.m., Benghazi time, when the first attacks started, and 5:15 am, when Mr. Doherty and Mr. Woods lost their lives, what conversations did either of you have with Secretary Clinton?" The answer was that they had none.

Who would want to be in the shoes of Panetta and Dempsey? According to their testimony, they knew right away that the Benghazi attack was the work of terrorists. Yet, there they were, alone at the helm, ordered to keep Americans safe from what their commander-in-chief thought was an angry mob of protestors — a commander-in-chief who then left for the night.

The principal obstacle they faced was the time it would take for a military response. As Panetta testified, aircraft such as AC-130 gunships would have taken "at least nine to 12 hours if not more to deploy." Dempsey testified that a “boots on the ground” presence in Benghazi would have taken 13 to 15 hours. Our forces were unready. When Senator John McCain asked why, Dempsey said that General Ham, the commander of AFRICOM, had made him aware of Ambassador Stevens's repeated warnings, "but we never received a request for support from the State Department." After thus blaming the State Department, Dempsey added, "I'm not blaming the State Department."

Senator Graham asked, "Did anybody leave any base anywhere to go to the aid of the people under attack in Benghazi, Libya, before the attack ended?" "No," Panetta responded, "because the attack ended before they could get off the ground." His thinking might have been that there was no point in sending military assets on a nine-hour trip to save the lives of four people who would be dead an hour before it arrived. But at the time Panetta and Dempsey were considering response options, there were over 30 lives at risk and no one knew the attack would end in eight hours. The assault against the consulate may have ended before help could get off the ground, but for all they knew, the assault on the CIA annex could have lasted much longer.

In this situation, how could you not send support? Send it without hesitation — right after the 5 o'clock meeting would have been good. Send it all — so what if it might arrive late. Ruling out political risk, what is the downside? And what if the attack lasted, say, 18 hours? Gunships could be there in nine, and “boots on the ground” in fifteen.

Panetta testified, "Despite the uncertainty at the time, however, the Department of Defense and the rest of the United States government spared no effort to save American lives." But evidently, other than the dispatch of an unarmed drone and a six-man, Tripoli-based rescue team, all effort was in fact spared.

Nothing was done to enlist the aid of the Libyan government. In a letter to President Obama, Senator Graham asked whether he had ever called a Libyan official on September 11 to expedite the deployment of US support to Libya. According to Graham, “And he said after a two-page letter from his lawyer, no." Expedited deployment would have prevented the 90-minute delay experienced by the FAST team of Marines out of Spain, a delay caused by State Department officials who required the Marines to deplane and change out of their uniforms. It could have prevented the Tripoli team from being held up at the Benghazi Airport for three and a half hours.

In this situation, how could you not send support? Send it all, and send it without hesitation — so what if it might arrive late?

The responsible officials didn't even send the air support that was promised to be above Benghazi when the rescue team arrived. Despite Dempsey’s claims that US forces were “in motion” from the beginning, he admitted that none ever attempted to reach Benghazi; no one ever ordered them to go there. Obama, Clinton, Panetta, and Dempsey could not say, with honor, that they tried anything that had a chance of helping.

We do not know what Obama and Clinton did the tragic evening of September 11, 2012. They may have gone to sleep. Panetta and Dempsey did not sleep. Perhaps the harrowing night of monitoring an attack, an attack that could not end soon enough, kept them awake. For they knew that their timidity might result in the deaths of more than 30 people, if the attack continued. And though only four would die, Panetta and Dempsey would live with their answer to the question, "Did anybody leave any base anywhere to go to the aid of the people under attack in Benghazi, Libya, before the attack ended?" — even if Senator Graham had never asked that question.

Then there was the anxiety of waiting to see whether the president would walk in. Would he be engaged and concerned, demanding a status report on what Panetta and Dempsey were doing "to make sure they’re safe"? Or would Mrs. Clinton barge in, at a point when it would have made a difference? Although the president had left it up to them, Panetta and Dempsey had not implemented a single effective military option; they had to worry that they would not be seen doing "whatever we need to do" to help. But Obama and Clinton didn't even care to call and check — not a single phone call throughout the entire, grueling attack. By the end of that dreadful night, Panetta and Dempsey might have asked, "What difference, at this point, does it make” that neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton ever showed up.

About this AuthorSteve Murphy is a retired missile defense systems engineer and software developer living on top of Green Mountain in Huntsville AL, where he does a little consulting, plays the stock market and writes — mostly about economics, science, and American life. He can be contacted at sfm@hiwaay.net.